20 Days of Orkney Trees #4

Our last post showed an image of trees being planted for St Magnus Cathedral's Octocentenary. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed some trees already in the background of the photos.

We found these earlier, rather fabulous, images of Provost Slater and other dignitaries planting trees in their full Council regalia and we thoroughly approve.

Any captions for these photos will be heartily welcolmed and added to this post and we may even send a sweetie (possibly pre-licked) to the reader who makes us laugh the most.

We do not have a definitive date for these photographs but they must pre-date 1936 as they were taken by Tom Kent and they probably date post 1925 as that is when John M. Slater became Provost of Kirkwall.

But what about the trees in the background of these images???? We have also found some articles from the Orkney Herald newspaper discussing trees in the Willows in 1922:

20 Days of Orkney Trees #3

Our last post was about the Norwegian gift of a tree which graces Kirkwall's Cathedral every Christmas. The tradition originally began in 1987, the year of St Magnus Cathedral's 850th anniversary.


50 years previous to this, some trees were planted in the Willowburn area of the town to commemorate the building's Ocotocentenary:

Anyone familiar with the Willows wood will be surprised to see them in such a sparse state. Now, the burn is surrounded by mature trees, many of which are home to crows and surrounded by flowers in the Springtime.


This photo, taken by Dougie Shearer in the early 1980s, shows how full the trees became. Many are sycamores, like the Big Tree of Albert Street.

These aerial photographs, also by Dougie Shearer, show how many leafy tree tops were bubbling up between Kirkwall's buildings by the latter part of the 20th Century: